When people lose a pet the sense of loss felt is often far greater than anything the owner expected. Often, it is a deep sense of a dear, trusted and integral family member being gone. This causes the owner to experience feelings he/she can feel uncertain about expressing to others. Knowing that the loss of a pet often needs a place for that grieving to be shared, and understood, there is inside this main community a forum where those who wish to communicate with others who share grief can go and do so.
The Wormhole; a short story
By Ben Luck
This story is about time travel, and its real events took place in The Yellow Bucket House during an icy cold winter snowstorm in the early January of 2010. At about two o’clock in the afternoon one of those notorious Montauk wormholes that wiggle through time and space opened up inside my living room on the right-side cushion of the striped sofa.
My sweet and fearless dog Homer jumped into the wormhole as soon as he saw it.
Homer knew no fear and he knew almost no pain or suffering that he couldn’t conquer without a yelp or a whine.
Storytellers far and near like to recount the countless hardships that Homer endured. Homer listened politely and then fell asleep when the stories got really wild.
Like the time Homer most cleverly climbed out of his pen as a puppy and got lost for three days in the dark woods of terra incognita, before he found his way back home by himself. People were deeply worried for him, all by his lonesome and without anything as tasty as his mother Nelly’s warm, abundant milk.
But all the storytellers will tell you that Homer didn’t care. Homer was used to hardships.
Homer lost several battles with the wheels of Jeeps and garbage trucks in his efforts to repel noisy intruders from his home territory under the junipers. His shins and flanks were scarred under his fur from deep abrasions.
But Homer didn’t care. Homer was used to hardships.
Over the years Homer toured thousands of miles with his friend Barney, who insisted that he behave well when taken to the best hotels, including some of the aristocratic palaces in which his mother Nelly had been welcomed. Many are the times Homer had to sprawl around for a day or more on a thick carpet before he could lose his leash, play smell detective, and get his ears rubbed and his nose petted.
But Homer didn’t care. Homer was used to hardships.
Homer snuck out of scrapes that other dogs, except for his mother Nelly, could never dream of getting out of. He was worse treated by far than any British secret agent. He was starved beside a desert, almost garroted with steel tethers, exposed to the threat but never the act of castration. He was lost and rescued again countless times, and then in summer months was tethered and denied his beloved full freedom to roam at will over the dunes.
But Homer didn’t care. Homer was used to hardships.
Finally there came the time that everybody thought was the end. A deranged Sag Harbor sailor from a boat with a mast 145 feet high coaxed Homer aboard with cheap dog biscuits, caught him by his collar and hoisted him up to the crow’s nest at the top of the mast ~ and then pushed him off.
The terrible thud of his body landing on the deck planks was heard all the way to the beach.
But Homer didn’t care. Homer was used to hard ships.
The Moral: Sometimes new meaning is merely the matter of opening a very small space.
That story was Homer’s story up to the moment he lay down in the wormhole.
He was soon curled up beside the sofa’s arm and he had slipped into a state that I can only describe as “near death.” Over the years, two dogs I’ve loved have died in my arms and so I’ve seen that look before.
Homer’s breathing was shallow and snuffly. His tail was still, his playful memories of beach runs, his hopes for trips in the car, his desire for good things to eat, all swam in the liquid depths of his chestnut brown eyes. The hair on Homer’s muzzle was a pale shade of brandy with a light spray of silver-tipped white.
I gently rubbed his muzzle back and forth between his eyes and his dark nose and as I did the white hairs slowly, perceptibly grew more and more numerous and whiter until his entire muzzle was almost snowy white. In just a few minutes Homer had aged many, many, many years and his eyes grew sad and infinitely wise.
Then came the passage of a long, speechless moment when two living beings are in tune and ageless in time, and we both remembered his life from escape-artist puppy then to “now,” and we somehow agreed that this particular moment of now was not yet the time for Homer to check out.
Almost imperceptibly Homer’s muzzle returned to its accustomed warm brandy and silver color.
Just to be on the safe side, I asked a kindly local newspaper editor, who happened to call at that difficult moment, if he knew of a vet open on a viciously windy and cold Sunday night, and he was good enough to provide an emergency telephone number he had handy. I called. “We are here and open 24 hours,” the nurse said.
Homer also agreed that I could lift him up bodily, something I hadn’t done since he was a young puppy and about 35 pounds lighter. I lifted him as tenderly as I could off the sofa and let him stand on the pine floor. He was unsteady on his feet for a few steps, and I walked into the kitchen and stuffed some ominous graveyard turkey soup bones into a trash sack.
When I looked up, Homer stood outside the kitchen door. His eyes were alertly lighted up again, his tail was wagging at his standard anticipatory speed, and he caught the morsel of turkey meat I tossed him in his teeth in midair. Almost nothing could have made me happier than to hear the energetic “snap” of his jaws.
For the sake of my ongoing research into the mythology of Montauk time travel I was tempted to jump into the wormhole myself, since it was nice enough to grace my house with its presence. But I’m a three-dimensional coward about leapfrogging into the mysteries of extra dimensions. Homer, however, was willing to do it again and he asked me to lift him back on the sofa because he didn’t have the leg strength to hop up himself. Reluctantly, I did. He fell immediately back into his torpor but, just as his breathing became so shallow I could barely see or hear it, he shook his head as if breaking out of a trance, lifted himself slowly up, and jumped down to the floor.
Homer was more sluggish than usual, but busy sounds in the kitchen now perked his ears and got him to investigate.
“Glad to have you back,” I told him. “Stay away from the wormhole.”
And that night he slept on the rug at the foot of my bed and by morning Homer was Homer again and the wormhole was gone, replaced by warm streams of bright sunshine from a nearly clear blue sky. It had been a grueling trip for both of us and we were pleased and grateful to be home together again in our own times. His eyes said, “Thank you for not letting me be put in a cage or a kennel at some animal hospital.”
Of course I knew Homer had, in his sweet, quiet way, already decided that whatever was at the other end of the wormhole he was determined to sniff it out and I could not stop him.
The next night he went to sleep on a carpet beside the bed and his breathing was calm and unlabored. I took this as a sign of false hope, like the flare of brightness of a candle flame just before it winks out. At about six o’clock in the morning, before first light, I let him walk outside. He stood in the bitter cold for a moment, looked at me with a sad apology for having grown so very old so soon, and I opened the door to let him back in.
I didn’t see it at first, but a wormhole had suddenly opened up on the carpet. He lay down, his eyes open, and without saying goodbye Homer disappeared into the tunnel. His warm and melancholy eyes stayed open and I could not close them.
Homer will be buried, as soon as the ground thaws enough to dig, in a shady garden of the Yellow Bucket House with a small terra cotta marker nearby that says,
Homer
May 5, 2002 ~ January 5, 2010
Homer didn’t care.
Homer was used to hardships.
(c) 2010 Ben Luck All Rights Reserved
